On the topic of talks, while at Google I was involved in an interesting SRE Classroom event in late 2013. These events were run by many of the SRE offices as a way of sharing design approaches with software and systems engineers who might lack exposure to large-scale systems.

I later gave my talk from the Dublin event to devops.ie in February 2014. PDF with speaker notes from that event:

Today, we're focusing on technical designs in large-scale software environments, and
patterns which we've found work well.

These can be relatively difficult to get exposure to.

This won't be an exhaustive treatment, but we hope to give you:

an appreciation of the kinds of constraints and opportunities we have at scale;

some tools for approaching design;

and a better idea of the kinds of systems SREs engage with.

Note the "Resources" slide towards the end: lots of good links on design and distributed systems there.

Based on presentations at the London and Mountain View SRE Classroom events by Matt Brown, John Neil and Robert Spier. I also include ideas from Jeff Dean's talk Building Software Systems At Google and Lessons Learned. Many thanks to Niall Richard Murphy, Alex Perry, Laura Nolan and Pete Nuttall for assistance, ideas and review.